Court rules Google thumbnail porn at work is grounds for dismissal

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Acceptable use policies are there for a reason, people, and if you happen to violate them even for barely more than a minute you’re putting your job at risk. That’s what one Illinois teacher found out the hard way. Robert Zellner, an 11-year veteran of the Cedarburg School District, was let go in 2006 for viewing inappropriate images on his office computer. No, he wasn’t taking a jaunt around the Web’s red light district. Zellner’s violation occurred while viewing thumbnails on Google’s image search.

It sounds like an overreaction by the school district at first. It is, after all, entirely possible to wind up with unplanned NSFW thumbnail results for the most innocuous of Google queries — and it’s especially possible if you search for the word blonde as Zellner did (strike one). Because the Big G is constantly indexing every piece of Web content its bot can track down, it’s amassed a cavernous collection of miniaturized pornographic images.

Zellner first clicked through to disengage safe search (strike two) — a move you normally wouldn’t need to make if you happened to be looking for images of, say, blonde beers. Once you’ve left-clicked and told Google you’re OK with unfiltered images for such a term, it’s fairly certain what you’re after. Zellner then proceeded to click the “next 20 images” button twice (strike three), sealing his fate. The whole episode only took 67 seconds, but that was enough to undo his decade-plus of service at the school.

Zellner argued that the district was retaliating for his public criticism of the school district, but the court sided with board officials in a unanimous decision. The moral of the story? Wait till you get home, or buy yourself a 4G tablet and keep your NSFW browsing activities to yourself.